Dream: The Ocean Skiers

Dream 20020913, 7:10 AM:

I’m in a small boat, out in the middle of a large body of water. It seems like it’s the Ocean, but at the same time, it doesn’t seem particularly deep. Some of the time, I can see the shore; other times, it seems like I can’t.

There is a man skiing across the water, but he has special things attached to his feet that function in the place of his skis, and he’s not being towed by a boat. He has ski poles like a snow skier. The things on his feet are strapped onto the bottom, and they are little motors; I think that they hold him up as well as moving him around. As he moves across the top of the water, he reminds me of a water-skating insect. He leaves little rings and ripples when he moves. He is moving in large sweeping patterns that remind me of ice dancing or figure skating.

Somebody in the boat with me dumps me overboard. I am soggy and miserable, sloshing in the water – it seems cold, although not chilling. I swim along, looking for a place to land, but it seems that I’m far from shore. The other people have left with the boat. There is some stuff floating in the water with me, and I take a big bowl and try to see if it will float with me in it like a coracle, but it is too small.

I start swimming. After a while, I come to a little island; it seems to be man-made, with a regular rounded shape and very clean white sand. It has a little tent-like building on it. A young man comes up to the island, skiing with the same strange devices as the guy I saw earlier. He doesn’t seem to be the same guy, though. This one has dark hair, which hangs wet down over his brow. He comes up to the island, and I’m clinging to the side of it. He goes inside, and starts doing things inside the tent – he totally ignores me, as if I’m not there. The side of the island is like hanging onto the side of a boat – it doesn’t seem to slope out from shallow to deep, more like it has a top that is on the surface, and is supported underneath by a pole or something.